What Cooking Creates

Cooking creates food, typically out of meat that has been found on fallen enemies or fish that have been acquired through fishing. While there is food in the game that can be bought from the vendor, it is somewhat pricier, and most cooking-made food also includes a Well Fed buff of some kind, which increases the character's stats after eating.

What Cooking Requires

In some cases, cooking requires very little, but typically a cook will need at least some kind of cooking fire. These can be found in various places in towns, especially inns, and can also be created from scratch with Flint and Tinder and Simple Wood.

Is Cooking For Me?

Cooking is a secondary skill, which means there is no reason to specifically avoid it. Perhaps you may not find it enjoyable to level or extremely useful, but there is at least some limited benefit in raising cooking. Hunters, in particular, often enjoy the easy source of fairly free food for their pets.

In terms of making money, cooking isn't very profitable. There are some recipes past level 60 that are fairly meaningful as short term buffs, and sell something like alchemy potions. Although anybody can cook, a lot of people do not train up the profession and must rely on the Auction House for their consumables.

There are several benefits of being your own cook, such as a few cooking quests, including one daily quest and being able to cook to eat and restore energy, health, mana, and other stats. It is a useful skill at any level.

Cooking Quests

With the exception of the daily cooking quests from The Rokk, there are essentially no quests that require cooked items. There are quests that supply cooking recipes as a reward and require raw materials, however.

There are now Dalaran Daily Cooking Quests which need to be completed to train Cooking beyond level 400. The quests allow you to earn Dalaran Cooking Awards which can then be used to purchase the recipes and Northern Spices required for leveling your Cooking skill between 400-450.